Sex and Aesthetics in Samuel Beckett's Work

Sex and Aesthetics in Samuel Beckett's Work
Author: P. Stewart
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 395
Release: 2011-08-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0230339271

This book places sex and sexuality firmly at the heart of Beckett. From the earliest prose to the late plays, Paul Stewart uncovers a profound mistrust of procreation which nevertheless allows for a surprising variety of non-reproductive forms of sex which challenge established notions of sexual propriety and identity politics.

Samuel Beckett’s Legacies in American Fiction

Samuel Beckett’s Legacies in American Fiction
Author: James Baxter
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 263
Release: 2021-11-30
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3030815722

Samuel Beckett’s Legacies in American Fiction provides an overdue investigation into Beckett’s rich influences over American writing. Through in-depth readings of postmodern authors such as Robert Coover, Donald Barthelme, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Paul Auster and Lydia Davis, this book situates Beckett’s post-war writing of exhaustion and generation in relation to the emergence of an explosive American avant-garde. In turn, this study provides a valuable insight into the practical realities of Beckett’s dissemination in America, following the author’s long-standing relationship with the countercultural magazine Evergreen Review and its dramatic role in redrawing the possibilities of American culture in the 1960s. While Beckett would be largely removed from his American context, this book follows his vigorous, albeit sometimes awkward, reception alongside the authors and institutions central to shaping his legacies in 20th and 21st century America.

Beckett's Art of Salvage

Beckett's Art of Salvage
Author: Julie Bates
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 251
Release: 2017-04-19
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1316739066

This innovative exploration of the recurring use of particular objects in Samuel Beckett's work is the first study of the material imagination of any single modern author. Across five decades of aesthetic and formal experimentation in fiction, drama, poetry and film, Beckett made substantial use of only fourteen objects - well-worn not only where they appear within his works but also in terms of their recurrence throughout his creative corpus. In this volume, Bates offers a striking reappraisal of Beckett's writing, with a focus on the changing functions and impact of this set of objects, and charts, chronologically and across media, the pattern of Beckett's distinctive authorial procedure. The volume's identification of the creative praxis that emerges as an 'art of salvage' offers an integrated way of understanding Beckett's writing, opens up new approaches to his work, and offers a fresh assessment of his importance and relevance today.

Beckett, Lacan and the Voice

Beckett, Lacan and the Voice
Author: Llewellyn Brown
Publisher: BoD – Books on Demand
Total Pages: 472
Release: 2016-03-01
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 3838208196

The voice traverses Beckett's work in its entirety, defining its space and its structure. Emanating from an indeterminate source situated outside the narrators and characters, while permeating the very words they utter, it proves to be incessant. It can alternatively be violently intrusive, or embody a calming presence. Literary creation will be charged with transforming the mortification it inflicts into a vivifying relationship to language. In the exploration undertaken here, Lacanian psychoanalysis offers the means to approach the voice's multiple and fundamentally paradoxical facets with regards to language that founds the subject's vital relation to existence. Far from seeking to impose a rigid and purely abstract framework, this study aims to highlight the singularity and complexity of Beckett's work, and to outline a potentially vast field of investigation

Gadda and Beckett: Storytelling, Subjectivity and Fracture

Gadda and Beckett: Storytelling, Subjectivity and Fracture
Author: Katrin Wehling-Giorgi
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 299
Release: 2017-12-02
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1351191454

"While the writing of Carlo Emilio Gadda (1893-1973) is renowned for its linguistic and narrative proliferation, the best-known works of Samuel Beckett (1906-89) are minimalist, with a clear fondness for subtraction and abstraction. Despite these face-value differences, a close reading of the two authors' early prose writings reveals some surprisingly affinitive concerns, rooted in their profoundly troubled relationship with the literary medium and an unceasing struggle for expression of an incoherent reality and a similarly unfathomable self. Situating Gadda and Beckett at the heart of the debate of late European modernism, this study not only contests the position of'insularity' frequently ascribed to both authors by critical consensus, but it also rethinks some of Gadda's plurilingual and macaronic features by situating them in the context of the turn-of-the-century Sprachkrise, or crisis of language. In a close analysis of the primary texts which engages with the latest findings in empirical research, Wehling-Giorgi casts fresh light on the central notions of textual and linguistic fragmentation and provides a new post-Lacanian analysis of the fractured self in Gadda's and Beckett's narrative."

Pop Beckett

Pop Beckett
Author: Paul Stewart
Publisher: Ibidem Press
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2019
Genre: Popular culture and literature
ISBN: 9783838211930

When Samuel Beckett's work first appeared, it was routinely described, by Adorno among others, as a clear example of European high culture. However, this judgement ignored an aspect of Beckett's work and its reception that is, arguably, not yet fully understood; the intimate relation between his work and popular culture. Beckett used popular cultural forms; but popular culture has also found a place both for the work and for the man. This collection of essays examines how popular cultural forms and media are woven into the fabric of Beckett's works and how Beckett continues to have far-reaching impact on popular culture today in a host of different forms, in film and on television, from comics to meme culture, tourism to marketing.

Samuel Beckett and the Politics of Aftermath

Samuel Beckett and the Politics of Aftermath
Author: James McNaughton
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 237
Release: 2018-08-09
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0192555499

Samuel Beckett and the Politics of Aftermath explores Beckett's literary responses to the political maelstroms of his formative and middle years: the Irish civil war and the crisis of commitment in 1930s Europe, the rise of fascism and the atrocities of World War II. Archive yields a Beckett who monitored propaganda in speeches and newspapers, and whose creative work engages with specific political strategies, rhetoric, and events. Finally, Beckett's political aesthetic sharpens into focus. Deep within form, Beckett models ominous historical developments as surely as he satirizes artistic and philosophical interpretations that overlook them. He burdens aesthetic production with guilt: imagination and language, theater and narrative, all parallel political techniques. Beckett comically embodies conservative religious and political doctrines; he plays Irish colonial history against contemporary European horrors; he examines aesthetic complicity in effecting atrocity and covering it up. This book offers insightful, original, and vivid readings of Beckett's work up to Three Novels and Endgame.

Principles of Dramaturgy

Principles of Dramaturgy
Author: Robert Scanlan
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 199
Release: 2019-07-09
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1351628712

In Principles of Dramaturgy, Robert Scanlan explains the invariant principles behind the construction of stage and performance events of any style or modality. This book contains all that is essential for training a professional stage director and/or dramaturg, including the "plot-bead" technique for analyzing play scripts developed by Scanlan. It details all the steps for the full implementation of "Production Dramaturgy" as it is practiced in professional theatres, and treats form and action as foundational cornerstones of all performance, rather than "story" elements – a frequent and debilitating misprision in theatre practice. Scanlan’s unique approach offers practical training that is supported by detailed diagrams and contextualized instructions, making this the missing text for classes in dramaturgy. Serving stage directors, dramaturgs, actors, designers, and playwrights, Principles of Dramaturgy is a comprehensive guide that puts the training of capable practitioners above all else.

The Routledge History of Literature in English

The Routledge History of Literature in English
Author: Ronald Carter
Publisher: Psychology Press
Total Pages: 598
Release: 2001
Genre: English language
ISBN: 9780415243179

This is a guide to the main developments in the history of British and Irish literature, charting some of the main features of literary language development and highlighting key language topics.

Zone of Evaporation

Zone of Evaporation
Author: Paul Stewart
Publisher: Rodopi
Total Pages: 212
Release: 2006
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 9042020776

Annotation "From the comic incongruities of Watt to the ontological gaps of The Unnameable, Zone of Evaporation demonstrates the crucial consistent role disjunction played in Beckett's novels. The book describes Beckett's divergence from Proustian metaphor and the revelation of the "real" towards an art which exploited the gaps and fissures within language and narrative and, ultimately, to an art which would go on to upset the post-structuralism of Jacques Derrida."--Jacket.